# Raunak Chowdhury

> CS, MIT '24 | Stuyvesant '19

Location: New York City Metropolitan Area, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/raunakchowdhury

Aspiring software engineer and entrepreneur dedicated towards bettering the community through education and mentorship. First-generation, low-income student.

## Work Experience
### Software Engineer @ Timely
Jan 2025 – Present | New York City Metropolitan Area

### Software Engineer Intern @ Bloomberg
Jan 2023 – Jan 2023 | New York City Metropolitan Area
- Overhauled a crucial system for repurchase agreement transactions (repos) to reduce startup time from 15 minutes to 5 seconds
- Integrated a persistent RabbitMQ instance for guaranteeing data consistency, increasing throughput of transactions from 400 to 40,000 messages per second, and
decreasing latency from 4.7 seconds per message to just 32 milliseconds per message

### Software Engineer Intern @ Bloomberg LP
Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 | New York, New York, United States
- Piloted the end-to-end infrastructure of the voice confirmation (VCON) system to Bloomberg’s proof-of-concept blockchain (BCHN) system
- Established a performant event listener interface (2,000+ transactions per second) between the BCHN system and the Quorum blockchain

### Software Engineer Intern @ Microsoft
Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
- Executed load balancing tests comparing Wordpress deployments on Azure, AWS, and GCP.
- Crafted a scalable testing infrastructure using JMeter and Blazemeter and testing methodology to garner usable results and ensure code heath + longevity

### Undergraduate Researcher @ MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Optimizing a LLVM-based Cloud Compiler for the Commit Group, led by Professor Saman Amarasinghe

### Founder, CEO @ BlockchainsForSchools
Jan 2018 – Jan 2021 | Greater New York City Area
Created a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (https://blockchainsforschools.org) that assists high school students interested in blockchain and cryptocurrency to learn and experience the blockchain space and community through mentorship programs, summer programs, hackathons, and other various events. We are also one of the $10,000 grant recipients from Consensys Grants Wave III, and have raised almost $45,000 to date. BFS is supported by MIT Sandbox and Venture Mentoring Service.

The HackBFS Ideation Challenge (http://hackbfs.com) allows students to develop use cases using blockchain and build out a fully-fledged business plan over the course of a month. Our first challenge occurred in summer 2020, involving 450+ students from 5 countries, 20+ companies (including IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, Mozilla, Akamai, Infosys), and over $15,000 in prizes.  

HackBFS, scheduled for May 30-31, 2020 (postponed due to COVID), promised to be one of the first hackathons that allows students (both high school and college students) to explore blockchain at an introductory level. We raised over $26,000 from Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco, Citigroup, Ernst & Young, Trail of Bits, and the Ethereum Foundation.

The BFS Mentoring Program connected high schoolers with mentors in the space. These mentors consist of software engineers, business executives, researchers, and investors who are actively working within blockchain industry at companies. Every month, the mentees and mentors convened to participate in mentorship activities. In our first cycle (2018-19), we had 180 participants (100 mentees, 80 mentors). 

Summer Immersion connected high school students to companies that are in need of interns. Our first iteration occurred in July 2019, with 65 students from 5 states working at 20 blockchain companies based in 4 cities. We hosted weekly workshops for them in partnership with Coinbase, Consensys, IBM, and Google.

### Software Engineer Intern: Query Execution @ MongoDB
Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | New York City Metropolitan Area
• Delivered implementation of the $firstN/$lastN accumulator operators for pipeline and collation operations
• Devised and implemented tripwire assertion calls, used to check developer-only invariants, into testing infrastructure
• Completed integration, sharding, and unit tests across 3 different systems for the above projects

### Software Engineer Intern: Alexa Privacy Experiences @ Amazon
Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | Seattle, Washington, United States
- Orchestrated the design and implementation of an internal tool to reduce configuration deployment time from > 8 hours to < 10 minutes and integrated it into 2 services for the Alexa Privacy Experiences team using Guice and Lombok
- Introduced a scalable and reusable Java library for implementing configuration deployment time reduction 
- Architected unit test suites in the services and library using JUnit, Mockito, and Lombok

### Software Engineer Intern: Firebase Backend @ elphi
Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | Greater Boston Area
- Engineered an efficient database structure to streamline information transfer between internal systems and clients such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
- Implemented the database using JS Firebase Functions and embedded the RESTful API calls in the internal React apps
- Collaborated with other internal infrastructure teams to debug and clean up React applications composing the systems

### Undergraduate Researcher, Digital Currency Initiative @ MIT Media Lab
Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | Greater Boston Area
- Built a frontend using React and react-vis to provide real-time updates on block overwrites in 50+ cryptocurrencies
- Integrated an internal DCI tracking backend to graph changes in block overwrite rates over time in cryptocurrencies

### Student, CSSI-Coursera @ Google
Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Greater New York City Area
- Selected as a student of Google's Computer Science Summer Institute-Coursera program
- Took an online course (Advanced Algorithms and Complexity) as part of Google's Data Structures and Algorithms curriculum
- Learned network flows, linear programming (LP), NP-completeness, and introduction to dynamic programming (DP)
- Programmed the Edmonds-Karp algorithm for bipartite matching, Gaussian Elimination, LP polyhedral optimization, NP reductions, a weighted independent set solver using DP, and Tarjan’s algorithm for a 2-SAT solver, using Python 
- Work available at https://github.com/raunakchowdhury/cssi-coursera

### Co-Founder, President @ Pegleg Prep
Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Greater New York City Area
Founded Pegleg Prep (https://peglegprep.com/), an education website aimed at providing free prep for the SHSAT to New York City middle school students. We also work on making data about the New York City school system publicly available and easy to digest.  The website is currently under development!

Additionally:
- Established partnerships with StuyPrep, CyberStuy, Stuyvesant’s Principal, Stuyvesant Red Cross, and the Stuy Alumni Association to produce content (80 lessons; 250+ hours logged) and to maintain the website
- Liaised with other NYC Specialized High Schools (Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech) to assist in creating lessons and personal anecdotes

In the future, we hope to connect students to free lessons and opportunities to learn about computer science.

### Director of Computer Science, Head Instructor @ New York Youth Technology Team
Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | Greater New York City Area
- Designed a Python curriculum that introduces advanced CS concepts, up to the AP level, to middle school students
- Opened an advanced Python class that teaches advanced CS concepts such as recursion and OOP in Python
- Held debrief meetings after every class for the purpose of improving the experience of the classes
- Instructed elementary school students in basic computer science using Scratch
- Reorganized the logistics system to optimize communication between instructors and to make classes flow more smoothly
- Implemented a system that assists instructors in choosing the most motivated students for the class
- Created an initiative to expand the NYYTT beyond Queens into other boroughs
- Assisted in an ongoing project that connects students and teachers in a forum – like manner

### Two Sigma Data Science Program @ Two Sigma
Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Greater New York City Area
- Learned pandas, numpy, matplotlib, principles of data science, and concepts of ML through lessons given by Two Sigma engineers and data scientists
- Analyzed election data from 1980 to 2016 using pandas, numpy, and matplotlib as a final project
- Won People's Choice for the Best Two Sigma Project

### Google Mentorship Program @ Google
Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Greater New York City Area
- Admitted to the Google Mentorship Program, which pairs high school students with Google mentors
- Building and developing CommuniSee, an app designed to improve communications between people with speech disabilities and their families 
- The ideas behind CommuniSee originated in the SHAPE program at Columbia University in summer 2018

### Research Fellow @ Global Coin Research
Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | Greater New York City Area
- Wrote articles and opinion pieces on Medium detailing the blockchain space and community.
- Attended multiple workshops (eg. CryptoNYC and meetups (eg. Samsung and Microsoft) to learn more about blockchain and its utility.
- Wrote a blockchain protocol and API in Python for the purposes of understanding blockchain on a deeper level.

### Summer High School Academic Program for Engineers (SHAPE) @ Columbia University in the City of New York
Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | Greater New York City Area
- Acquired skills in efficiently programming and writing code.
- Learned new sorting algorithms and data structures to better understand those used in professional Computer Science industries, such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
- Built an Artificial Intelligence in Python to understand the logic and workings behind an AI.
- Competed in an AI-only Othello tournament.
- Executed customer discovery interviews as part of the Entrepreneurship elective. 
- Presented a sample pitch and pitch deck on a communications app (CommuniSee) for enhancing communication between people with speech disabilities and their family members in front of a panel of investors.

### Intern @ Khan's Tutorial
Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | Greater New York City Area


## Education
### Bachelor of Science - BS in Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jan 2019 – Jan 2024

### Stuyvesant High School
Jan 2015 – Jan 2019


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/raunak-chowdhury

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Source: https://flows.cv/raunakchowdhury
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/raunakchowdhury/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-01